Will felling and leaving a tree for a couple of weeks help dry it out?

[caber]

10% is a good bit of moisture for 1 week of waiting. Seems well worth it if you are able to leave the tree there and not worry about someone else grabbing it.

 

[polaris]

10% is a good bit of moisture for 1 week of waiting. Seems well worth it if you are able to leave the tree there and not worry about someone else grabbing it.

Geez I'm familiar with cattle rustlers and horse thieves but "wood Rustlers"? What is the world comming to? I think if any of the above visit my place I would try them myself and sentence them to minimum of 2 weeks hard splitting, stacking and stall mucking.

 

[polaris]

10% is a good bit of moisture for 1 week of waiting. Seems well worth it if you are able to leave the tree there and not worry about someone else grabbing it.

 

[M1sterM]

here's a curvaball=
i heard felling the tree around jan was also effective because the juices had drained. at this time ,tree aint gonna have leaves so how might these 2 scenarios compare?

Just trying to "stump me" (pun intended), aren't you! ;-P

Probably the best time to cut a deciduous tree down while it has the minimal amount of moisture in the vascular tissue would be from late fall to the middle of winter when the days are shortest. Note, however, that in late January, when the days are getting longer, and in regions of the country where some days are above freezing, you might get some sap moving (which occurs for several weeks before the buds really appear). Unfortunately, there are no leaves to draw off the moisture at that point so you would want to split right away if you want to get any seasoning to occur...whatever little can occur due to sublimation since most of the water will be frozen for most of the time. Because the water is practically frozen, and not much seasoning is going to occur anyway for quite some time, it's more of an intellectual exercise at that point.

 

[crazy_dan]

The question I have is..
Why don't you take a maul, sledge, and wedge with you?
You have to split it anyway and it is a lot easier to load splits than it is to load rounds.

About the time the leaves are due to start emerging I usually drop a years worth of trees. Let them lay then i can cut on them when ever i want till it gets to hot to cut. If I don't get it all cut up that is fine they will be there next fall/winter to finish.

 

[caber]

Geez I'm familiar with cattle rustlers and horse thieves but "wood Rustlers"? What is the world comming to? I think if any of the above visit my place I would try them myself and sentence them to minimum of 2 weeks hard splitting, stacking and stall mucking.

I'm working thru a 10 acre lot someone else owns to get wood for sale next year and if we were to drop a tree and leave it there, one of the other crews might "misidentify" it as one of their own and take it. Accidentally, of course.

On our own wood lot, I drop a bunch, leave em for a while and then cut them up.

 

[Apprentice_GM]

The question I have is..
Why don't you take a maul, sledge, and wedge with you? You have to split it anyway and it is a lot easier to load splits than it is to load rounds.

Yes, but the question is whether to leave the tree intact to whither for a week or 2 first before splitting - whether splitting is onsite or at home is a different question. I like the idea of splitting onsite though, both because you leave the chips behind, it's easier to load splits and reduces handling times - as I have only an electric splitter at the moment I don't have this option. Yet. And owning a splitter, even a cheap electric hydraulic unit, means I am not taking a maul, sledge and wedge anywhere Well to split anyway . . .

 

[Cluttermagnet]

10% is a good bit of moisture for 1 week of waiting. Seems well worth it if you are able to leave the tree there and not worry about someone else grabbing it.

Geez I'm familiar with cattle rustlers and horse thieves but "wood Rustlers"? What is the world coming to?

Even when times are good, there is 'wood rustling'. (Imagine how bad it gets when the peasants are starving and have no cake!)

A news item here in recent years was an account of Paulownia rustling. This fast growing tree is very valuable, especially in Asia. The Japanese make traditional musical instruments such as the koto from its wood. Also used in surfboards and a lot of other stuff.

I bet the occasional walnut tree gets rustled, too. Fine hardwoods are getting very expensive by the board foot these days. You'll know times are truly getting hard when you hear of increasing firewood rustling from stacked piles of splits. ;-) Whole downed trees? Nah. Well, maybe a little amongst woodsmen. Wood envy, you know. :lol:

 

[Wet1]

I was originally thinking it would be too difficult to semi-scientifically test this, but the more I think about it, maybe not.

Test idea:

Using a tree that's fairly uniform in diameter at the base (maybe 6" to 10" in dia.), drop tree on day one and cut a few 16" billets off the trunk end of the tree. Immediately label and record the weight of the cut billets. After one week of withering, cut a 16" billet off the end which was exposed to air for the week and disregard this sample. Then cut and record the weight of a few more billets freshly cut from the withered tree. As this point you could split one of the billets from each as a sub group to show how much splitting contributes to the seasoning process, if you wanted to prove what we already know.

Over the course of the next year or two, each sample (which would be stored in the same manor) can be weighed at regular time intervals and the data plotted. At some point the wood should all reach an equilibrium.

I suspect if withering the tree did have any significant effect, that you should see it in the shift of the data or shape of the curve as the wood seasons.

Thoughts or better ideas???

 

[Apprentice_GM]

I was originally thinking it would be too difficult to semi-scientifically test this, but the more I think about it, maybe not.
<snip> Thoughts or better ideas???

It's already been done, and proven. 5 to 10% in the first week, depending on type of wood and climate. See my earlier post in this thread. Garret 1983. Full report presumably available from US Dept of Forestry, as was the solar kiln article I found referencing it.

Down Under in our hot and dry climate you draw over 10% of moisture out in first week from gum trees through withering.

 

[Woods Dweller]

I girdled some trees and left them standing a year thinking they would dry some being off the ground. It worked, but they were harder to cut and the bark had separated (had some bugs). I would now rather cut and split in place.

I've been cutting and splitting wood all this week that has been down for about four years. Mostly 12 - 20 foot trunks from when the land was cleared to build the house. Talk about bugs! About half of the wood has what I call bug rot. Anywhere from a half inch to maybe an inch of soft crumbling sponge like mess on the outside with beatles the size of Paul, John, and Ringo! HUGE red and black beatles that have apparently eatin the outer most layer of the downed wood. But the inside of those logs are hard as a rock and dry as a bone. I'll be able to burn it this year. A ittle tuff on the saw chain, but it splits on the splitter beautifully. I've probably cut and split about 4 cords this week with about that much left in the pile. I'll finish it up and burn it this year. Save this springs wood for next year.

 

[Cluttermagnet]

A neighbor scored some nice Oak and a little Maple from some tree thinning at another neighbor's house nearby. He then split these big rounds about 4-6 weeks after the live trees were cut, maybe ~2 weeks after the log length wood was cut into shorter rounds. It has been instructive to have watched that big pile of splits next door for the next month or so. The pile has shrunk. It has quite visibly lost some height. Must have been throwing off a heck of a lot of moisture in the first weeks after being split.